Schools are notoriously tough to scale up and the government isn’t letting profit-motivated models to take off. But a new breed of entrepreneurs is experimenting with some solutions
Krishnan Ganesh, chairman and founder of TutorVista.com, an online tutoring company, is a serial entrepreneur with a nose that can sniff out new opportunities very early. In 2002, he and his wife Meena sold their call centre business, Customer Asset, to ICICI for $20 million. His investment in the next business, Marketics (a data-analysis start-up) fetched him a good return too (he sold it to Business Process Outsourcing firm, WNS, for $65 million).
While Career Launcher’s Satya Narayanan has set up new schools in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns, Ganesh of Manipal K-12 is tying up with trusts which had set up schools (and owned the land and buildings) but were struggling to run the schools better.
Raising money and working around regulations is a serious worry for entrepreneurs, but there are other complexities as well.
(This story appears in the 16 April, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)